Just when you think you have it all figured out, you realize that you have to repaint the future you made. The canvas is filled with new colors, and you see that they look better than before. My picture was filled with the city line of Bergen, where I wanted to move. In the painting, some of my best friends stood next to me. In the horizon, I saw a new job, a new life.

Yesterday I was on an audition for a choir I have dreamt about joining since I moved to Førde. Two years ago, I was on my first audition with them, but I was so nervous that I almost could`t sing and I lost my chance to join them. My nervousness was right under the surface this time too, but I felt a little bit better since I have started to take singing lessons. The day before, I had a lesson together with my motivating teacher, who pushed my limits and made me sing at a pitch I felt uncomfortable with. But suddenly my voice did things it had never done before. We did a high-five after I finally managed to sing “stand by your man” properly. He told me I just had to believe in myself, and to not be afraid of “singing out”. For me shouting out sounded like I was an animal in pain, but he told me to stop thinking like that, so I did.

I drove to the audition with this in my mind. When I came there, I was as ready as I could be. I had chosen to sing “jar of hearts”, and managed to sing it without faltering too much. But then I came to “Stand By Your Man”, and everything went wrong. Each time I came to the point where I had to sing out, my voice disappeared, as if it suddenly decided to take a vacation.

I was sure I had ruined my chances, but luckily the woman I sang to, gave me another chance. She put on a karaoke version of the song, and let me sing again. This time I managed to sing like I had practiced at home, with some hiccups. When I didn`t manage to sing like I should, she suddenly came up behind me and started touching my stomach and lifting my hands. She told me this was to help me use my breath in the right way. With a firm tone, she told me to relax in my shoulders as they almost went up to my hair. She also told me I had to draw in as much breath as I could and then save the air until I started to sing. Otherwise, the air would leak out and I would`t have enough left to sing for more than seconds. Her energy and strange approach to my singing, made me laugh and relax enough to sing better than I thought I was capable off. At one point she told me she got goosebumps. I never thought I could sing good enough to evoke emotions in others, and now I did. I was still sure I had ruined my chances, when she told me that I would be invited to join them.

I started to cry and felt joy souring through me. I couldn`t believe it, and I`m still surprised when I think about it. Since this has been one of my dreams, I just have to grab the opportunity, even if it means staying in Førde longer. My plans of moving this summer, must be abandoned for the time being. From now on my painting will be filled with musical performances and new experiences.

Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

All too often, however, drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, are prescribed instead of teaching people the skills to deal with such distressing physical reactions. Of course, medications only blunt sensations and do nothing to resolve them or transform them from toxic agents into allies.

The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.

We all have our stories. Right now I’m sitting in mine. It’s quiet around me, except the music I’ve put on. Music is such a good way to remember the past. You float back, letting the sound waves transport you back in time. There is so much in our emotional briefcases, everything from dreams that flew away and guilt that chained us. We also have drawers filled with all the things we should have said and done, but never managed to do. I recently read ‘the illegal gardener’, a lovely book where regret and guilt was one of the red threads weaving the plot together.

I read a quote that really touched me:

she could only do what she had the knowledge and power to do at the time.

How often don’t we think about what we should have done, even when we simply couldn’t. We have no magical abilities that rights all wrongs, we have no crystal balls that we forgot to look into. We only have our developing minds, not yet ready to understand what we know today. Our brain still needs to grow, it needs to learn what happens when we stumble and fall. And most importantly, we need to learn how to get up again. We need to let the chains of guilt loosen, or we will never get where we need to go.

Advancements in genetics and neuroscience are undoubtedly leading toward direct methods of mind control, albeit only with good intentions … if government and establishment science can be believed. However, an array of hi-tech methods have been announced which show clear potential for negative manipulation.

As I’ve previously suggested in other articles, our memories help us form our identity: who we are relative to where we have been. Positive or negative lessons from the past can be integrated into our present decisions, thus enabling us to form sound strategies and behaviors that can aid us in our quest for personal evolution. What if we never knew what memories were real or false? What if our entire narrative was changed by having our life’s events restructured? Or what if there were memories that were traumatic enough to be buried as a mechanism of sanity preservation, only to be brought back to us in a lab?

Research has commenced into many facets of how memory can be restructured, whether it is erasing memories, the implantation of false memories, or triggering memories of fear when none previously existed. (Source)

MIT researchers, for example previously claimed to have found the specific brain switch that links emotions to memory. MIT went on to admit that these findings could lead not only to direct intervention via manipulation of brain cells through light, but a new class of drugs to treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Once again, memory tinkering is making the news. This time it comes from the University of Toyama, Japan, where researchers claim to have for the first time, “linked two distinct memories using completely artificial means.” I have highlighted areas of the press release below which are consistent with similar research into supposed solutions for PTSD. The same disturbing language is present that seems to indicate a desire to reverse engineer the process and create fear-based trauma.

So far, ethical boundaries seem fuzzy at best, and downright non-existent in various areas of brain study. It is a time when more light needs to shine upon this research, who is funding it, and what is permissible. Given the outrageous abuses already committed by government-directed science, and a global climate of centralized health control, we would do well to read between the lines of these announcements and prepare to become very critical of their pursuits.

The ability to learn associations between events is critical for survival, but it has not been clear how different pieces of information stored in memory may be linked together by populations of neurons. In a study published April 2nd in Cell Reports, synchronous activation of distinct neuronal ensembles caused mice to artificially associate the memory of a foot shock with the unrelated memory of exploring a safe environment, triggering an increase in fear-related behavior when the mice were re-exposed to the non-threatening environment. The findings suggest that co-activated cell ensembles become wired together to link two distinct memories that were previously stored independently in the brain.

“Memory is the basis of all higher brain functions, including consciousness, and it also plays an important role in psychiatric diseases such as post-traumatic stress disorder,” says senior study author Kaoru Inokuchi of the University of Toyama. “By showing how the brain associates different types of information to generate a qualitatively new memory that leads to enduring changes in behavior, our findings could have important implications for the treatment of these debilitating conditions.”

Recent studies have shown that subpopulations of neurons activated during learning are reactivated during subsequent memory retrieval, and reactivation of a cell ensemble triggers the retrieval of the corresponding memory. Moreover, artificial reactivation of a specific neuronal ensemble corresponding to a pre-stored memory can modify the acquisition of a new memory, thereby generating false or synthetic memories. However, these studies employed a combination of sensory input and artificial stimulation of cell ensembles. Until now, researchers had not linked two distinct memories using completely artificial means.

With that goal in mind, Inokuchi and Noriaki Ohkawa of the University of Toyama used a fear-learning paradigm in mice followed by a technique called optogenetics, which involves genetically modifying specific populations of neurons to express light-sensitive proteins that control neuronal excitability, and then delivering blue light through an optic fiber to activate those cells. In the behavioral paradigm, one group of mice spent six minutes in a cylindrical enclosure while another group explored a cube-shaped enclosure, and 30 minutes later, both groups of mice were placed in the cube-shaped enclosure, where a foot shock was immediately delivered. Two days later, mice that were re-exposed to the cube-shaped enclosure spent more time frozen in fear

than mice that were placed back in the cylindrical enclosure.The researchers then used optogenetics to reactivate the unrelated memories of the safe cylinder-shaped environment and the foot shock. Stimulation of neuronal populations in memory-related brain regions called the hippocampus and amygdala, which were activated during the learning phase, caused mice to spend more time frozen in fear when they were later placed back in the cylindrical enclosure, as compared with stimulation of neurons in either the hippocampus or amygdala, or no stimulation at all.

The findings show that synchronous activation of distinct cell ensembles can generate artificial links between unrelated pieces of information stored in memory, resulting in long-lasting changes in behavior.

By modifying this technique, we will next attempt to artificially dissociate memories that are physiologically connected,” Inokuchi says. “This may contribute to the development of new treatments for psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder, whose main symptoms arise from unnecessary associations between unrelated memories.”Recently by Nicholas West:

I am a psychologist working as a trauma therapist in Norway.
I am blogging about my life and psychology-related topics. I am also working on a book about my life and work, that will be published this year.
Thank you all for visiting my blog.